Critiquing Fish

I read Marco Arment’s opinion of the current state of Apple Music, and he’s certainly not being koi about how fishy he thinks the service, app, and iTunes integration are.

That place is great. Nice staff, casual atmosphere, good food.

You didn’t like it? Really? Why? It’s great.

Oh, you got the fish? Rookie mistake. Don’t order the fish, it’s terrible. But everything else there is good!

Marco’s frustrations are broad, and far-reaching. He’s not articulating a specific problem he’s had, but he’s been burned by various things, and most importantly, knows other people burned by things.

On the one hand, my immediate reaction is to agree with what he’s saying. Then my second reaction is to wonder if it’s too harsh because it’s not a specific account of an issue. Then I’m back to where I started because it doesn’t matter if it’s a specific account of an issue, because that’s not how people function. He’s very correct in his restaurant analogy. Bloggers might be one-star-Yelp reviewing Apple Music, and iTunes, but that’s life.

The other day, I mentioned on Twitter that I stumbled across a problem with my music library after the Apple Music transition.

Someone replied to it with “radar ticket”.

For those unfamiliar, Apple has a bug tracker called Radar. It’s mainly for developers, and people participating in betas to use. It’s not for real humans to use. You can tell, because it still has pinstripes on the page, and shaded iOS pre-iOS 7 widgets. It’s not linked to the apps, you go find it, log in, and write a report.

I am no stranger to bugs, and bug-tracking, as I’ve had plenty of experience with a ticketing system Imageworks uses to internally track software bugs. A problem with these ticketing systems is that most people (myself included) can’t fill out the perfect ticket, or their ticket might be a duplicate issue. No one has a perfect ticketing system.

The closest analog a restaurant has to this is a comment card, but it’s a comment card customers aren’t supposed to know about, so that doesn’t really work. It’s not like calling the manager over, that seems to require a very public declaration.

While I did file a Radar, I wouldn’t really fault myself for not filing one. Nor would I fault others for simply deciding not to come back to the restaurant to order 🐟.

The allure of this particular restaurant is that it’s supposed to be a no-hassle experience.

  1. Just as an aside, a not-so-dissimilar organizational problem exists in Settings. Settings frustrates for organization, and for how parts of the Settings panes don’t even function or look the same. A defense of Bad Mac Settings is that people “just search” which is the same dismissal people give for bad file management. However, if you search in Bad Mac Settings for “Desktop & Documents” it returns zero results. If you search for “iCloud” you get several results, and the one you want is “Apps Using iCloud” (because iCloud Drive is an “app”) and then where it says “iCloud Drive” there’s a right-aligned “On >” You might think that just takes you to a toggle to pick between On or Off, since that’s all the nuance they chose to offer, but it opens a modal dialog that grays out the settings (not a navigation to like “>” implies) and then you can see “Desktop & Documents Folders” which has a toggle and explanation. There is a “Sync this Mac” toggle right above that, but that’s for iCloud Drive to have its synced folder on the Mac, it’s not syncing the actual Mac, because why would you do that when you can sync Desktop & Document Folders. But whatever, people just find exactly what they need using search so no need to bother with organization or interface design! ↩↩↩↩

2015-07-27 08:45:00

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